But the man asked suddenly and roughly, “How much will it be for a robe?”
Now when the pedlar said the price, at that moment the mother came forth with the money in her hand counted and exact to the last penny and she cried out alarmed, “We can spend no more!”
At that cry of hers some desire hardened in the man and he said wilfully, “But I will have myself a robe cut from this piece and I like it very well so that I will have it for the once! There are those three silver pieces I know we have.”
Now those three coins were of good value and coins the mother had brought with her when she came to be wed, and her own mother had handed them to her for her own when she left her home. They were her precious possession and she had never found the hour when she could spend them. Even when she had bought the coffin for the old mother when they thought her dying, she had pinched and borrowed and would not spend her own, and often the thought of those three silver pieces was in her mind for safe riches, and they were there if ever times grew too hard, some war or hardship that might come at any hour and lose them the fruits of their land. With those three coins in the wall she knew they could not starve for a while. So now she cried, “That silver we cannot spend!”
But the man leaped up as swift as a swallow and darted past her in a fury and he went to that cranny and searched in it and seized the silver. Yet the woman was after him, too, and she caught him and held him and hung to him as he ran. But she was not quick enough and never quick enough for his litheness. He threw her aside so that she fell upon the earthen floor, and the child still in her arms, and he ran out shouting as he ran, “Cut me off twelve feet of it and the foot and more to spare that is the custom!”
This the pedlar made haste to do, and he took the silver coins quickly, although indeed they were somewhat less than he had asked, but he was anxious to be away and yet have his stuff sold, too. When the mother came out at last the pedlar was gone and the man stood in the green shade of the tree, the blue stuff bright and new in his two hands, and her silver gone. The old woman sat afraid and when she saw the mother come she began in haste to speak of this or that in a loud creaky voice, “A very pretty blue, my son, and not dear, and a long summer since you had a grass cloth—”
But the man looked blackly at the woman, his face dark and red, and he roared at her, still bold with his anger, “Will you make it, then, or shall I take it to some woman and pay her to make it and tell her my wife will not?”
But the mother said nothing. She sat down again upon her little stool and she sat silent at first, pale and shaken with her fall, and the child she held still screamed in fright. But she paid no heed to him. She set him on the ground to scream, and twisted up afresh the knot of her loosened hair. She panted for a while and swallowed once or twice and at last she said, not looking at the man, “Give it to me then. I will make it.”
She was ashamed to have another do it and know the quarrel more than they did now, watching from their doors when they heard the angry cries.
But from that day on the woman harbored this hour against the man. Even while she cut the cloth and shaped it, and she did it well and the best she knew to do, for it was good stuff and worth good care, still she took no pleasure in the work and while she made the robe she stayed hard and silent with the man, and she said no small and easy thing about the day or what had happened in the street or any little thing such as contented women say about a house. And because she was hard with him in these small ways the man was sullen and he did not sing and as soon as he had eaten he went away to the wayside inn and he sat there among the men and drank his tea and gambled far into the night, so that he must needs sleep late the next day. When he did so in usual times she would scold him and keep him miserable until he gave over for peace’s sake, but now she let him sleep and she went alone to the fields, hard and silent against him whatever he might do, though her heart was dreary, too, while she kept it hard.
Even when the robe was done at last, and she was long in making it because there was the rice to be set and planted, even when it was done she said nothing of how it looked upon him. She gave it to him and he put it on and he shined his ring with bits of broken stone and he smoothed his hair with oil he poured from the kitchen bottle and he went swaggering down the street.
Yet even when this one and that cried out to him how fine he was and how fine his robe, he took no full sweet pleasure in himself as he might have
